Remember the little girl who started all this (Language of Listening®) way back at age four when she had a problem at her preschool then suddenly couldn’t leave my leg? And I sought help from an internationally known play therapist, Dr. Garry Landreth, because she was only a few months away from starting Kindergarten?
By age 26, here’s how the world seemed to Colleen as voiced during her breakthrough work:
“I just got that I think caring about someone means keeping them alive. If you blindly trust someone to care about you, and you end up dying, it’s your fault for making the wrong choice to put your faith in them. That’s why it’s important for you to be right. If you’re wrong the people you trusted to care about you will let you die.”
That is Colleen bringing awareness to a “life lesson” that has run her life for over 20 years! And as usual, it rings so true of fears I had about keeping kids alive (caring about = taking care of = keeping alive) and so many more related to trust, fault, choice and having to be right. Yes, she came by her fears honestly, and now look at her! Unraveling them all for both of us and other family members as well!
So many of our fears are inherited or deliberately handed down as “life lessons” that no one likes. For a child, those lessons can actually be true – infants and young children are right that they need someone to care for them, or they could die. Learning who to trust to take care of you is an early “life lesson” that can increase the odds of survival.
The problem comes when a fear-based “life lesson” remains with you as an adult in the form of a belief about who you are – in this case helplessly dependent.
That’s what she did, and me before her, and my mother before me… when we took on the belief that “being cared about = being taken care of = being kept alive = helplessly dependent.”
Since helplessly dependent does not match who you really are, your natural tendency toward growth kicks in and propels you to create a life that proves you are not. In Colleen’s case, that included challenges like having few childhood friends, choosing an intensely difficult high school curriculum, and now deciding to make it on her own as an artist in NYC. Of course she’s gained proof of many STRENGTHs along the way with independent at the top of the list!
Now that she’s proven to herself that she can survive on her own, it’s the perfect time for her to re-examine her fear-based beliefs from an adult perspective. Unconscious fears can create anything from a general sense of uneasiness to a heavy burden or a phobia level fear. Gaining awareness of them as beliefs, not truths, can lead to complete breakthroughs – sudden perspective shifts where the whole world changes in front of your eyes and an invisible weight lifts from your shoulders. As clients often say, “Everything is the same, but nothing is the same.” That’s what Eva and I help clients do in our breakthrough coaching programs.
When I look back at Colleen’s Power Playtimes at age four, I can see that she was tackling this same set of fear-based beliefs even then. Week after week, she created a makeshift baseball game with a beanbag “ball” and container lid “bat.” For her, tricking me into believing that she would stay on third base was critical, as was the result…stealing home! She won, I was wrong and no one died, proving over and over that life is not as scary as she thought, and most of all, that she was not helpless! This was Colleen rebuilding her STRENGTHs while laying the groundwork for dismantling this “life-lesson” about trust that she knew just couldn’t be right! And it worked. After a couple months of weekly Power Playtimes, she skipped off to her first day of Kindergarten without looking back!
If you learn a “life lesson,” something you really don’t like, but you think you have to learn to survive, notice how you still continue to look for proof that it is not true. You always keep searching because deep down inside you know it can’t be true. And interestingly enough, you’re always right!
What belief or “life lessons” that you don’t like have you noticed?
